A quick guide to great product photography

Product photography is hard. Making your pictures look Instagram and Pinterest worthy is difficult and can often use up a lot of your time. So I spoke to Amelia from Fresh Shoot Studios for her top tips if you’re feeling frustrated with your Instagram or want pictures on your website that inspire your customers and show you as a premium provider that you can encourage customers to follow you or book you.

Types of Photography

Firstly there are two principal types of photography for any business.

Product photography

Product shots are your traditional white background shots that help people see the product in detail with no distractions. Use them as product photographs for online shops or other retailers.

Lifestyle photography

Lifestyle shots are more in the style of Instagram and Pinterest with products in contextual settings. They are used for inspiration across multiple online channels, including social media and your website.

Top Tips for Product Photos

1. Use Natural Light

Unless you are able to use a lighting set-up, such as a studio, the best light for photography is always natural, and you should avoid flash as much as possible, as it causes strange lighting and shadows on your photographs. Also if you’re lighting isn’t right, it won’t matter how much editing you do, it will always look dark or over-exposed.

2. Give it space

Use negative space to your advantage, make sure your products have lots of space around them, either for text on a header banner or to give your Instagram some white space and avoid it becoming overcrowded.

Also, keep an eye that you’re not accidentally cropping off the top or bottom of your product.

Top & Bottom Cut Off

Space around the whole product

3. The right background

Choose a place where your product is going to look great. When doing a product photo, this is usually white, but another plain colour that compliments your product will also work well. For lifestyle shots, this could be a wooden table, light marble or the item in a situation. Make sure you take a look at the background, is there anything that is jarring or lookings odd. Make sure everything looks clean and pretty and also that it’s not detracting from the primary focus of the picture, your product.

Product shot with plain background

Lifestyle shot with clean background

Busy background and bad layout

4. Use an editing program or app

Whatever photo you take, it’s unlikely to come out exactly as you want it. There is a range of tools to help you enhance your photos quickly. On your phone try VSCO or ColorStory, which are great apps for anyone to use. If you’re looking for something a little more advanced, Photoshop and Lightroom are brilliant.

5. Angles

Try taking the photos from a variety of perspectives, like a close-up side shot, a top view and a side view. Try lots of different techniques until you find something that works for that product and that you love.

6. Inspiration

The best way to see what you could be doing is by looking at what other people are doing. How are similar brands to you taking photos and are they smashing it? See what is going on Instagram and Pinterest and start having fun with trying out new techniques.

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